Dave's Adventures in Business Intelligence

I use a web statistics package from Urchin. They were originally a separate vendor but got assimilated by the big “G” a few years back. I have not tried to completely evaluate their data collection process, but I have played quite a bit with their reports. One of my favorite bits of information is the list of countries that have visited BOB. Periodically I post this sort of information on the board, but I’m not sure how many other people are interested other than myself. 🙂

A few days ago I was visiting another site and they had an interesting list with tiny little flags and numbers. I clicked the flags and was taken to a site called Flag Counter. There was a very simple process for setting up my own counter (I did not even have to register) and so I did. You can see the results here on my blog (over on the right sidebar, you might need to scroll down some to see it) and also on BOB.

Within ten minutes of implementing the flag counter code on BOB there were over 15 countries listed. That was fast. 😆 Now we have recorded visits from 119 countries (how they classify countries is interesting) and it has been just less than 24 hours since I started the counter. One interesting fact: Folks living in the United States provide approximately 40% (less than half!) of the total visitors to BOB. Costa Rica is the newest country to visit (as I type this). Within the United States, California has provided the most unique visitors, with New York and Texas in second and third. Considering these are three of the most populated states that makes sense. I have collected 50 of the 51 states (District of Columbia counts as a state), so if you know anybody from South Dakota that uses BusinessObjects make sure they know about BOB. 😀

As I have been typing this, someone from French Polynesia showed up, taking Costa Rica’s spot as the newest country to visit.

There is a “pro” version of the flag counter that provides more advanced statistics, but they suggest that I should contact them first if I am going to send more than a million page views monthly through their servers. Considering we see an average of 3.5 million page views a month on BOB, I sent them an email. 🙂 I hope we can leave the flags up as I think they make for a interesting (and fun) piece of data for the site.

And we’re all about data, aren’t we?

Related Links

• FlagCounter.com
• BOB